I’m a staff writer at Forbes covering real estate: from ultra-luxury homes to foreclosures to the people making the deals happen. Until recently, I was a member of our Forbes wealth team, crunching numbers for our Forbes 400 and World’s Billionaires lists. Before that I investigated a former Hell’s Angel for the City Pages of Minneapolis, trekked to the U.S.-Mexico border with the Minutemen for the Orange County Register, and exposed Michael Jackson’s property tax problems for the Santa Maria Times. A born and bred Westerner with strong ties in Minnesota, I love calling NYC home. Twitter: erin_carlyle. Got tips? Email me at ecarlyle@forbes.com.

Data-Driven: Luxury Home Price Gains Slower Than Rest

Given the recent string of record-breaking sales of ultra-luxury homes –$147 million in East Hampton, $120 million in Greenwich–one might get the idea that the value of high-priced abodes is skyrocketing. But that’s not the case at all. In fact, it turns out that prices for non-luxury homes are rising much faster.

To get at the real numbers, we asked TruliaTrulia and ZillowZillow to cull their data on home prices. Looking at all for-sale, non-foreclosure listings, Trulia found that from May 2013 to May 2014, national home prices rose 6% in top-tier neighborhoods (zip codes where prices are in the top 10% for each city). Prices in neighborhoods not in the top tier rose at a significantly higher rate of 9.3%.

The trend is a reversal from the prior year (May 2012 to May 2013), when national home prices in luxury zip codes rose 9.2% and non-luxury rose 8.4%. (Before that, from May 2011 to May 2012, price gains in both luxury and non-luxury zips were about the same: 0.4% and 0.3%, respectively.)

Looking at the data another way, Zillow explains part of the reason that non-luxury prices are growing faster than luxury. As the graphic below shows, the top third of the residential market fell less dramatically during the housing crash than the bottom third of homes. It’s also come up less in the past three years–but it had less far to travel to recover.

Data as of May 2014

“It’s conventional wisdom that the higher end tends to be stickier,” says Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist. “So the downward movements on the high end, you’d see after you see them on the low end.” Put another way: ”More affluent homeowners can afford to sit out down markets. If they don’t like the price of the home they can wait it out. A lot of homeowners at the lower end don’t have that luxury.”

Greater price gains for non-luxury homes are also consistent with the fact that the housing market tightened more at the low end over the past year, points out Kolko, the Trulia economist. ”Tight inventory has led to bigger price increases,” he notes. However, there are always exceptions, and a handful of metros have seen bigger price gains in luxury than non-luxury: not surprisingly New York City; as well as Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio; Austin, Tex.; Philadelphia, Pa.; and St. Louis, Mo.

Still, compared to the national average, high-end housing is roaring back on the gold coasts of California and Florida. Using data from Zillow, the map below shows the increase in sales prices for the top third of the residential real estate market from the bottom in November 2011 to March of this year for America’s 500 largest metros.

High-end homes in San Jose, Calif., jumped 38.3% during that time period, to $1.4 million in March. Northern neighbor San Francisco saw a similar jump, rising 34.1% to a median price of $1.1 million for the top third of the residential market. Homes in Orlando and Miami-Fort Lauderdale rose 27.4% and 26.7%, to $277,800 and $389,100, respectively.

But the fastest-growing market for high-end housing during that period might surprise you: Mount Vernon, Ill., saw a 64.7% price jump for the top third of homes, from $103,700 at the bottom to $170,800 this March.

Less zippy: luxe homes in the Northeast and Northwest. Prices for the top third of homes in Walla Walla, Wash., are still 0.4% lower than in November 2011, the national bottom of the market. In Aberdeen, they’re 8.8% lower. Many more places in the South, Midwest, and Northeast are still down from the national crash, as the map above shows.

When we look at just the top 10% of the residential real estate market (with Trulia data), non-luxury outstripped luxury in terms of price gains in 42 of the 50 largest metros, from May 2013 to May 2014, as the graphic below shows.

(An abbreviated version of this story appeared in Forbes magazine’s Leaderboard section as “Home Equity Bomb Shelters,” June 16, 2014, Volume 193 Issue 8 Page 20.)

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